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mygif

>Basically, if the Watchmen are supposed to be purely symbolic, it’s pretty easy to construct a reading where we should be rooting for them to tear down the entire rotting edifice of the DC Universe and free its inhabitants.

With Cerebus and Spawn leading the charge?

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mygif

Oh, man, that whole huge “setting aside” parenthetical about all the grimmest grimdark shit that Johns has written. At this point, the disrespect to Moore and Watchmen is just standard-issue corporate assholery, with nothing really special about it. The part I found really impressive in its horrible audacity was Johns’ attempt to pawn off all culpability for the things he’s complaining about but which he himself was actively responsible for putting on the page in the first place.

Also, that yes, the promise of Rebirth is that this gruesome crucible of terrible shit happening will be followed by a return to the bright shiny happy smiley fun times of the Silver Age (of mostly white heroes), which is a promise I can recall Johns or stories he was involved with making again and again for pretty much the entirety of his tenure at DC, and yet none of them have ever stuck the landing.

(How does he keep expecting to make things clean when he’s always washing them in blood?)

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mygif

@Slarti: I agree, but with the caveat that until recently DiDio did have the power to overrule him, and if there’s one person who has consciously and consistently attempted to rebrand DC as grimdark, it’s DiDio. I consider it a possibility–slim, but present–that DiDio is the one behind the inability to stick that landing, because he doesn’t want it stuck.

Still doesn’t excuse ‘Blackest Night’, though.

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mygif

Yeah, I’ve heard about that, and while I understand that Johns surely likes having a job and getting paid and that those things requires (or required) letting DiDio have his way, it’s still galling to see him try to pass the buck on even his part of that to an entirely unrelated fictional character.

Unless… Wait. Does this mean that Doctor Manhattan is Dan DiDio?

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mygif

I consider it a possibility–slim, but present–that DiDio is the one behind the inability to stick that landing, because he doesn’t want it stuck.

But this of course means that he’s still in the seat to screw it up, even if only to say “I toldja so” when it comes crashing down.

Regardless, I think the lurching from thing to thing is mainly DC being unable to figure out what “the market” wants. The highlight of Dan Didio’s tenure at DC was basically during the Infinite Crisis/52/One Year Later couple of years and he’s been spending the time since then lurching from one thing to another to recreate that particular formula. This is another attempt where I suspect he’s just handing it off to Johns and saying “hey, if you think you know what these idiots want then give it to them – we’ll see if it works”.

And I don’t think it will. Partly because I think Johns continues to be embarrassed about his love of superheroes (that’s what the whole grimdark phase is and what each creator’s grimdark phase is – working through their embarrassment of loving a genre where grown men and women run around in underpants beating up other grown men and women running around in their underpants. Grimdark is a juvenile attempt to take that genre and make it “less embarrassing” by making it more “serious”). Nothing I’ve seen from Johns during the New 52 era would lead me to believe that he’s outgrown that embarrassment yet.

Of course he won’t be writing any of this new direction for DC, so I guess from that standpoint it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the creators they put on the books are people who are happy to be writing about superheroes as superheroes, or if they’re still embarrassed by the fact that they love something that is at its heart very childish. If they’re in the former camp some good things can come of this, but if they’re stuck in the latter camp then we’re screwed.

And really it comes down to what the fans in the direct market and the retailers who own the comic stores actually want. Have they outgrown the embarrassment and defensiveness that leads to high sales on grimdark books? If they have then a new direction has a shot of sticking, but if they haven’t and what they really want is a Superman that will rip the Parasite’s arms off of his body and then bludgeon him to death with them then this doesn’t have a chance.

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mygif

And to be honest – Grant Morrison did this “DC’s corporate direction is screwed up” metacommentary a lot better in Multiversity. And at the end of Batman Incorporated. And Azzarello did it with the Doctor Thirteen story that he wrote.

I continue to be surprised at how often not-so-thinly veiled critique of DC’s corporate direction ends up getting published by DC. It’s really weird – I go back and forth between thinking that the high ups really do not bother to read what’s being published and that they do read it and agree with it but are stuck because of the culture at Warner Bros.

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mygif

Apart from a few good reviews of the ‘Omega Men’ reboot and some passionate defenses of ‘Final Crisis’, I’ve heard absolutely nobody telling me I made a mistake here.

I was really huge into DC for like a decade and a half or so, when they had kind of a creative resurgence aimed right at my age group. I have a complete pamphlet collection of DC One Million, which is still my favorite of their event crossovers from an age when events only lasted a single goddamn month. I have a complete pamphlet collection of Impulse, and Young Justice, and the Tim Drake Robin series.

I remember being really excited by Infinite Crisis… and then being left utterly cold by the aftermath. I fucking gave up by the time of Final Crisis.

(And I’ve always wondered, is that how people who were invested in the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths status quo felt like? I gained a lot of sympathy for them, because if I could fucking press a button and bring back Bart Allen and kill Jason Todd, I’d goddamn do it.)

There was some quality stuff in New 52… but the thing is, they cancelled all their best stuff! Sword of Sorcery was something I started reading on the advice of friends, for example, and I loved it, because it accomplished the astounding trick of getting me to care about Gemworld… nope! Cancelled!

I just don’t know what DC is doing anymore. Marvel at least occasionally gets me to care about individual characters; the Fraction run of Hawkeye, Kamala Khan, Loki from “Journey into Mystery” through “Agent of Asgard.” Etc. DC can’t even seem to manage that these days. I keep thinking I should read the Harley Quinn book but then I look at the cheesecake covers and am like “Jesus god, even Amanda Connor can’t make me care and I love Amanda Connor.”

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mygif

I just want to point out that new Wally is not being sidelined for old Wally. New Wally will continue to exist and is set to be one of the new Teen Titans, while old Wally will hook back up with the not-teen Titans.

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mygif

The problem with the new 52 is that it completely threw continuity out the window. All the Heros were 10 years younger but we’re still expected to beleive that things like blackest night and the death of superman still somehow happened when their is no way a feasable time line for that existed. Add to that the fact that the books that were working like green lantern didn’t really get de aged but just kind of continued without missing a beat just showed that you were reading a hodg podgh of things that didn’t even kind of fit together. At least now their is an explanation and they can try to fix the mess. The worst part is dc didn’t even stick with the things that did work about new 52 (the horrior line) they abandoned that and things like the expansion of the green and the red were the best thing to come out of the whole reboot and it was causily forgotten.

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Lord Riven said on May 28th, 2016 at 2:11 am

About, oh, six years ago now – during that depression period that was post-college, pre-universtiy, I really heavily got into comics via internet downloads. I devoured things I loved (Runaways, even some of the later stuff), things I still love but recognize are kind of a mess (The Books of Magic – man is that series a fantastic case study for how jumping writing teams a couple times can fuck so many things up), to things I loved and now realize are garbage (Fables, which hit its first major ‘wait what moment’ when Bigby needed to give a shoutout to Israel and then went complete to shit once the Authority was defeated and the comic inexplicably just kept going despite having lost all momentum and going to some shitty places).

But what I really, really fell in love with was the No Man’s Land Arc in Batman*. IT had moments of darkness, it ahd moments of levity, it had a real shake-up to the status quo and it let itself run wild with possibilities. As a setting it was flatly fasciating,* and the characters and… nnnn, it’s so good. I especially loved the introduction of Cassandra Cain, who stole my heart and swiftly became perhaps my favourite comic heroine of all-time***.

It was No Man’s Land that made me a die-hard fan of DC – and it was learning everything DC did afterwards that made me despise it as a company. The way they treated, and have continued to treat, Cassie disgusts me, physically digusts me, making her a footnote in the Bat Family – not a TRUE member like Drake or Grayson, but a never-was, juut… just… unforgiveable.

Rotting edifice has the right of it. DC needs to fall.

(and fuck Dan Didio. This is the man who cancelled Reboot when he still worked in television. Hating Dan Didio is all Canadian’s patriotic duty.

*Except the Azrael issues. Literally everything to do with Azrael is garbage.

**even if the setup never actually makes sense when you think about it for too long, as it requires a shockingly hire number of Americans to become total sociopaths about their own nation in a way that holds no water after 9/11, which proves that at very least Americans need to pay lots of lip service to the idea of caring about disasters on their own soil.

*** Besides Sally from the criminally unknown Thieves and Kings – for fuck’s sake, Canada, we produce a truly brilliant comics writer in the person of Mark Oakley and we spent the last twenty-five years ignoring him. This is why CanLit sucks)

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mygif

I disagree about Johns work compared to the stories that the grimdark stuff in comics came out of. In most of those stories the suffering and the grimness is a key to the story, and it adds a darkness to it.

The stuff of Johns the people complain about is unpleasant but it feels sort of like a comment of if you’re throwing around that sort of strength some times bad things happen.

It’s like in Captain America the First Avenger. We see dozens of nameless soldiers disintegrated by Hydra’s tesseract weapons but no one says that adds darkness to the movie

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mygif

@Dylan – I’ll believe it when I see it. DC has a horrible track record when it comes to paying lip service to keeping around legacy characters after the silver age version comes back. Hell, just look at original Wally when Johns did Flash Rebirth. Utterly sidelined for Barry. Ditto Kyle Rayner for Hal, Conner Hawke for Ollie, JSA Hawkgirl for original Hawkgirl, etc.

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Jess Nevins said on May 28th, 2016 at 10:49 am

I think there are a number of us in the journalists’ position. We -could- tell Moore about this, but we don’t want to be the ones to do it.

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@Jason: I think the issue here is that he then complains that comics have gotten too dark. Nobody says you can’t write a story where Superboy goes insane and literally punches Pantha’s head off and there’s an on-panel shot of it rolling down the street…although it may be a titch inadvisable…

But for the guy who wrote that to then ‘tsk tsk’ Watchmen for making comics too bleak and cynical is a little bit much, y’know? Johns can either say that DC needs to be bright, shiny and optimistic, or he can write a scene where the very first DC superhero is beaten to death on-panel by Superboy. He can’t do both.

And he sure as hell can’t come back a decade later and do the exact same thing all over again, this time blaming someone who has had less influence over the direction of DC during the last fifteen years than he has.

@Jess Nevins: I don’t blame you. I think this was a cruel thing to do , and I wouldn’t want to be the one who had to tell a close friend about it. Someone’s going to have to, of course, but…I just thought DC had run out of ways to hurt Moore.

Also: OMG Jess Nevins read something I wrote I’ve got your books on my shelf OMG SQUEEEE!

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mygif

I got a kick out of that last paragraph, because I’m still grateful for this one time when a writer whom I respect saluted something I’d written:

“‘So if George Lucas is holding up the world, what’s holding up George Lucas?’ Damn, I wish I’d thought of that bit.” — John Seavey, Jan. 4, 2008

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mygif

“Oh, and as to the other “big revelation”, apparently the World’s Greatest Detective has never done a DNA test on his arch-nemesis. Or a fingerprint test. Suffice to say I am giving this one all the side-eye in the goddamn world.”

Eh, that’s easy to handwave by making some vague comic book science claims about the Joker’s physiology. “During my first encounter with the Joker, I learned that his fingerprints had been burnt off years ago. I keep trying to take fingerprints, but even when I can get the Joker’s gloves off, they’ve always turned out to be useless. I sunk millions of dollars of WayneTech’s resources into developing DNA testing just to figure out who he is, but the Joker’s DNA has never been consistent, even when I took multiple samples from him at once, even when I reexamined a single sample multiple time. I thought it was just a side effect of the toxins that the Joker uses, but now I know there is more going on.”

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Iamcrute said on May 29th, 2016 at 3:10 am

You should read New52:

Azzarello’s Wonder Woman
Lemire’s Swamp Thing
Lemire’s Animal Man
Snyder’s Batman

4 amazing runs which I’d stack up against anything out there…the rest just kind of ignore as you choose

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mygif

“DC has a horrible track record when it comes to paying lip service to keeping around legacy characters after the silver age version comes back.”

This. I can’t believe that DC will be publishing two Titans books for long, teen or otherwise. They haven’t been able to keep people interested in the Titans concept since Johns himself was writing it in the early 2000s. (Except for the cartoons, of course.) What happens to the two Kid Flashes when their books get cancelled? Back into limbo with at least one of them, and if they have to choose it’s not going to be the one they just brought back with such fanfare.

Honestly, this solution to the Kid Flash problem is a disservice to both characters. Because of DC/Johns’s determination to a) continue creating new legacy characters and b) never let go of any old legacy characters, they’ve populated their universe with so many extraneous versions of the same characters as to be ridiculous. I mean, how many speedsters do we need? How many different stories can be told with Green Lantern #3rd From the Left? It’s nice to have families of characters, I guess, but they can’t all be in play at once. Some of them actually work better as memories (I’m looking at you, Barry).

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mygif

@Thok: But even if you lampshade it, what is this in service to? I can’t think of anything that needs to be explained by three Jokers–Jokers who apparently coordinate their activities carefully so as to avoid ever being spotted in different places at the same time, which Batman would have noticed and which would defeat the point of the whole exercise. (And which, needless to say, is wildly out of character for the Joker.)

It just requires so much handwaving for so little payoff that I can’t imagine any point beyond generating a headline.

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mygif

“And which, needless to say, is wildly out of character for the Joker.”

Is it? Having multiple Jokers would increase his ability to create chaos, and it seems like a great joke on both the reader and Batman. (I’ll agree that not revealling the punchline is out of character for the Joker.)

It also appears that the idea behind the multiple Jokers is to have each one reflect a portrayal of the Joker over time; the first is Golden Joker, the second is the Bronze age one from Killing Joke/Death in the Family, and the third is a more modern one. I could totally see the first Joker realizing that the first Robin was no longer working with Batman, and wanting to do something similar to mock Batman.

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Socraticsilence said on May 29th, 2016 at 3:02 pm

I really don’t like the integration of Watchmen into the mainline Universe, if only because it makes the ending of the run nonsensical. If Ozymandias et al exist in the same universe as the rest of DC then it’s insanely monstrous that following the attack on NY, all of the protagonist essentially decide to keep Ozymandias’s plot rolling other than Rorsarch who is vaporized by Dr. Manhattan. In the self-contained universe of Watchmen it makes for an interesting moral debate- hell, you could even argue that Ozy committed mass murder but saved the world by doing so (yes even with the post script) but without the near certainty of Global Nuclear annihilation it boils down to supposedly decent people covering up the crimes of an old friend.

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mygif

@Thok: How would it increase his ability to create chaos, though? He can’t execute multiple plans simultaneously, because then he gets spotted in two places at the same time and the jig is up. Ditto with doing stuff while in Arkham; are we supposed to believe that two other Jokers are going to lie low to benefit a third? That’s not really in his nature.

It makes more sense if it’s chronological, if the Joker has died and passed on his name and modus operandi to a successor, but even then I don’t know what it adds to the mythos other than complexity. It feels like the start of one of those “we keep changing the backstory until nobody can follow it anymore” problems that sidelined the Vision and Ghost Rider for ages.

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mygif

@John

It feels like the start of one of those “we keep changing the backstory until nobody can follow it anymore” problems that sidelined the Vision and Ghost Rider for ages.

You know, given that the context of this discussion is the DCU, I’m surprised you didn’t just reference Hawkman and drop the mic.

Re: multiple Jokers, the way they’re doing it is so nonsensical.

There’s a very, very easy way to tell that story to be moderately entertaining on multiple levels. Joker “dies.” Because this is comics, everyone reading is like “yeah, right.”

And it’s true, he’s not actually dead… he faked his own death because he knew that would immediately spawn a host of imitators that he can manipulate subtly from the shadows. The larfs! The mayhem! You do some commentary on the ridiculousness of the revolving door of death, make sure the Joker successors are sufficiently colorful, interesting, and diverse to hold up their end (of course, they’ll have to fight each other more than once), throw Harley in there somewhere.

That would be a moderately entertaining yarn you could easily run in the bat-books for like a year or so before Regular Flava Joker comes back and wraps it all up. It wouldn’t be epic or world-shaking but it might be interesting to read.

Only that’s not what they’re doing. Instead they’re deciding to do… something that looks pretty crazy.

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sentmerc said on May 29th, 2016 at 5:25 pm

A small aside on “apparently the World’s Greatest Detective has never done a DNA test on his arch-nemesis. Or a fingerprint test.”

He has to have something to compare it to. Batman has buckets of Joker’s DNA, sure. But it’s not like we have a database of every citizen’s DNA. Unless he has access to that person’s DNA pre-Joker, identified by name, having Joker’s DNA does nothing at all. Same thing for fingerprints. People are fingerprinted when criminal charges are brought against them and for certain ID purposes (government employment, employment with children or other at-risk persons etc.) but general citizens are not. So again, whoever Joker was pre-Joker would’ve had to have his prints in the system already for it to matter if Batman has his prints. And not all parts of the system communicate and share data with each other as well as they could.

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mygif

“He can’t execute multiple plans simultaneously, because then he gets spotted in two places at the same time and the jig is up.”

Well, sure he can’t do multiple simultaneous plans in Gotham at the same time. But it’s a big world out there, and Batman can’t watch everywhere at once.

(I don’t really think they’ll use that method, since you’d need to explain why Superman doesn’t know about the multiple Jokers, and I’m not convinced that DC can properly write about the Jokers committing crimes in Venezuela/Uganda/Laos/pick your favorite underrepresented country in the DCU. But that’s just the first method of handling it that popped into my head.)

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mygif

@sentmerc: But he can compare it to his existing Joker file. If Joker #1 commits a crime, in the course of his investigation and capture of that Joker both Batman and the justice system would record that info. Yes, that might not tell them the Joker’s true identity, but if a completely different guy calling himself the Joker committed a crime and was investigated by Batman, he’d notice that hey, all the unique biometric information doesn’t match.

@Thok: Again, though, we’re back to the “What’s the payoff?” problem. If the three Jokers are operating in different parts of the world and Batman has never met two of them, then it’s not much of a reveal, is it? “There’s another guy calling himself the Joker somewhere in Uruguay!” is not the kind of shocker that requires a Mobius Chair to unveil.

(Not to mention, what kind of a Joker do you have to be to never generate a newspaper headline? Sooner or later an Internet search would find the “Joker of Barbados”, unless we’re also expected to believe that in addition to never DNA testing or fingerprinting the Joker, Batman doesn’t have any kind of Google alert set up for “Joker escapes from” or “Joker murders”.)

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mygif

John Seavey- you have to confront the issues you don’t like to deal with them. But to me Johns dark and 80s grimdark just feel like very different animals. He’s not going for the sort of emotions you find watching the news or something

As for the Joker, I hope the reason there’s three of them is because after the Crisis the Joker just decided he didn’t like the reboot stuff and he wasn’t going to change or fade away. And then after one of the other cosmic retcons the post Crisis Joker that had popped up with the reboot also decided not to change.

So we have pre-Crisis Joker, Post-Crisis Joker and post Flashpoint Joker

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mygif

if the Joker looked similar enough that he didn’t realize it was a different guy, which he apparently didn’t then he wouldn’t realize he needed to compare it against the old DNA sample

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mygif

I’d been assuming all the Jokers were, essentially, the same guy… just different Earth’s Jokers, all having ended up in the post-Flashpoint Earth. So they’d all have the same DNA and fingerprints.

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@JayDzed said on May 29th, 2016 at 11:59 pm

@Jason:

“if the Joker looked similar enough that he didn’t realize it was a different guy, which he apparently didn’t then he wouldn’t realize he needed to compare it against the old DNA sample”

Yeah, ’cause Batman, the World’s Greatest Detective, and the man with a plan to take out anyone, including his team-mates, wouldn’t notice any difference or even just test Joker every time anyway.

Riiiiiight.

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mygif

There are times I almost feel pity for little Jeffty Johns and his desperate need to have DC Comics be exactly the way they were in the Silver Age, but then I think, “Naw, screw that guy.”

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mygif

The previous explanation for Joker’s differing attitude/appearance/modus operandi over time was that he occasionally just ‘decides’ every once in a while to just completely change his style, wipe out his henchmen, etc. There was a whole issue that was all CG art and prose about it.

Joker has been so inconsistent over time that Batman considering it’s a different person each time there is ‘revamp’ of the Joker would mean he’d never believe his facing the same person twice. At some point he’s been able to fit some kind of method to the madness where he is able to ‘know’ when it is an impostor Joker.

Then again, there being three Joker’s around simultaneously without Batman figuring it out would be about as ridiculous as say … Captain America being a secret Hydra agent and still being considered worthy of wielding Mjolnir.

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Lupus753 said on May 31st, 2016 at 6:22 pm

It sounds a lot like Geoff Johns had the premise and characters of Watchmen explained to him, but he never bothered to read it, at least not the ending. That is the most charitable interpretation of Johns’s use of Doctor Manhattan I can think of.

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Halloween Jack said on June 10th, 2016 at 5:12 pm

I really don’t care if DC is thrashing with Reborn, because they’ve been thrashing for a while, pretty much ever since Doctor Light tore Sue Dibny’s tights in Identity Crisis, in fact. They’ve had a few bright spots recently, but not that many; Charles Soule doesn’t seem to be doing anything for them any more, they keep giving Gail Simone titles and then taking them away or cancelling them, there was the whole Batwoman mess, and so on. Even keeping up with their bonehead moves is getting tiresome.

And the thing with Dr. Manhattan, I’m convinced, is due to DC’s collective grudge at Alan Moore not just refusing to endorse or support their continued exploitation of their work, but doing that big interview with Adi Tantimedh in which he described just how dickish, and in what ways, they were to him just in this latest round. That’s when I started seeing a lot of backlash to Moore, much of which, I believe, was probably started or egged on by DC or their proxies. He overturned the rock and moved it far enough away so that the pale, wriggling things underneath it couldn’t crawl back under fast enough. My guess is that, no matter how Moore feels about this deep in his heart of hearts, his public reaction will be along the lines of, well, isn’t this in line with what I’ve been saying about them all along?

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philippos42 said on June 12th, 2016 at 11:33 pm

Why do fans think that Geoff is repudiating grimdark? He is grimdark!

No, whatever optimistic motifs are in this are there to be ripped away in the end. It’s a storytelling motif.

Fans who think that Geoff is changing course are projecting onto Geoff Johns and tricking themselves. This is way beyond Charlie Brown running to kick the football held by Lucy. The cautiously optimistic responses to the “hope” in the first chapter shows that either they simply don’t understand the first thing about Geoff’s storytelling technique; or they’re so desperate for someone at DC to write the comics they want that they kid themselves that Geoff will be that person.

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mygif

I don’t consider Geoff grimdark at all.

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Jim KOsmicki said on June 15th, 2016 at 12:15 pm

Omega Men is good, but the latest version of Prez is absolutely worth reading. Get the recent TPB collection and then wait for the supposed second “season” that’s to come. This is what the original Prez series was trying for and simply couldn’t get done for various reasons (mainly old men trying to write young hippie style characters).

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